Cheat Engine

[jgoemat]

I often find myself wanting to do a pointer scan in games where there are no static pointers to find out how structures interact with each other. From the name 'Structure spider' sounds like what I want but I can't tell what that tool is supposed to do.

What would be perfect would be a way for me to do a pointer scan, but to be able to enter an address that must be used as the base instead of having it search static addresses, and then to be able to change that base address the next time.

For example in Space Pirates and Zombies I use Geri's script to find the current ship pointer and I wrote a script to find a structure with the beam weapon range. Normally I would do a pointer scan for the base address of the beam structure, but the current ship pointer is not static as far as I can tell. If the ship is retrofitted I have two new addresses. I want to do a pointer scan to find paths from one structure to another. The example I have is a ship structure at E1795780 and the beam weapon structure at 2A1D6D00. After refitting the ship the ship structure is now 278331780 and the beam structure is at 3C512700. It is probably the case that the ship has a pointer to a weapons structure that has a pointer to an array of weapons that has a pointer to some beam weapon base structure that contains the pointer to the structure I'm looking for and I just want the offsets like "C70, 58, 0, 97C"

This could be useful even if there are static pointers. I remember doing many pointer scans in FTL and Prototype 2 when I already knew a static pointer to a base structure and being able to specify that starting address would let me omit two depths from the pointer scan.

[Dark Byte]

That is the structure spider yes
While it's secondary feature is to compare values between structures at the same time, you can ignore that feature and just make it behave like a pointerscan that runs from the opposite side (sequential)

In your example:
Fill in as base address E1795780
tick "pointer must be in range"
and fill in the range of 2A1D6D00 to 2A1D6D00

Then do a scan. (the other options don't matter too much, and you can leave "compare against" empty )

When the scan is done, (can take a while) refit the ship

then do a rescan with base 278331780 and range 3c512700 to 3c512700
The offsets left form the path from the base to the destination that have not changed.

Also, next ce version also has a option to scan for a specific start address, including dynamic addresses. (The scan will take a little longer than a normal scan without filtering, but it might be useful)